Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes coming!
- Thread starter shanejayell
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^ That is the most fascinating thing about that panel. Also I noticed the Tardis cloister's bell is red!!!! This thing keeps getting more and more awesome!
Ziggy!
I think that's just a coloring error; there's a bunch of those in this issue, unfortunately.
Wasn't that tiny, so only the Atom could use it?
There's lots of other devices they could've put in there, too, like the Chronosphere from Seven Days, the leap machine from Quantum Leap (forgot its name), the aforementioned Epoch, et cetera. There's just only so much stuff you can cram on to one page.
I don't think it is a colouring error...doesn't it change colour when there is an emergency in time and space? I seem to recall it did this during the Bad Wolf thing, but it's been a while since I watched those episodes.
Err, that's just the roof light. The cloister bell is an internal alarm signal, audio only. The TARDIS roof light flashes during materialization and dematerialization. (Real police-box lamps were used to summon police officers patrolling in the area; the police station could activate them to "page" an officer to call in, or a member of the public could trigger them as a way of summoning help.)
Ah bad job on me then. I should have known that. LOL
And shame on me for not realizing that as well. Bell = sound, not light.
Well, it's an understandable error. The cloister bell is an alarm, and a lot of alarms include both sounds and flashing lights (e.g. a Starfleet red alert signal). And the roof lamp on a police box was intended as an alert beacon of sorts. And it is shaped a little like a bell. So it's not surprising that the mind would unconsciously link the two things.
I'm going to blame my error on the fact that it was late, and I was tired. 
Not to go too far off-topic, but I do have a question for you, Christopher: it's been mentioned that you consider things like ST/LSH or the upcoming Trek/Who crossover to be "imaginary stories," thus you won't reference them in your DTI or other novels. Why is that? Is there just too much to keep up with? I'm certainly not implying that you can't be bothered with them, I'm just honestly curious. It seems that something like DTI in particular is ripe for all sorts of obscure references to those stories, as you've thrown in plenty already!
Not to go too far off-topic, but I do have a question for you, Christopher: it's been mentioned that you consider things like ST/LSH or the upcoming Trek/Who crossover to be "imaginary stories," thus you won't reference them in your DTI or other novels. Why is that? Is there just too much to keep up with? I'm certainly not implying that you can't be bothered with them, I'm just honestly curious. It seems that something like DTI in particular is ripe for all sorts of obscure references to those stories, as you've thrown in plenty already!
I should think it would be obvious. Most different SF universes don't fit together. There are too many differences in their history, in their cosmology, in what planets and species exist, in how the laws of physics and biology operate, etc. Alternate timelines can't differ that much. They'd have to have the same laws of physics, since they're branches off the same universe. And if they diverged long enough ago that other planets and species formed differently, then Earth and humanity probably wouldn't exist either.
So it's one thing to tell a fun apocryphal story imagining what could happen if the characters from two different SF franchises could coexist, but it requires ignoring a wealth of irreconcilable contradictions between the universes, so such a story can't be taken seriously as a "real" piece of either universe.
For instance, back in the '90s I was a huge fan of Alien Nation (still am, but it's been a long time since I've seen it so it's become more muted). I thought it would be cool if there were a way to fit it together with my other great love, Star Trek. But it wasn't possible, since we know that Trek-universe Earth was not settled by Tenctonese refugees in the 1990s, and if the Tenctonese species existed at all in the Trek universe, surely we would've seen them at some point in all the shows and movies.
And where the DC Universe is concerned, the Guardians created the Green Lantern Corps countless ages ago, so if the Trek universe were some alternate history of the DC Universe, surely it would have Green Lanterns in it. And when Quinn sent Voyager back in time to the Big Bang, they should've seen the Hand of Krona. And what about the Greek gods? In Trek, the aliens who passed themselves off as Greek gods abandoned Earth millennia ago and faded into oblivion, but in Wonder Woman, the Greek gods are still present and active in Earthly affairs. And so on.
Cool, thanks very much for your explanation. I had wondered because I know you've put Doctor Who references in your Trek novels, for example, and those are also two vastly different universes. I can certainly see where a universe filled with superheroes would cause a significant problem, though.
For the record, the hand Krona (and Dawlakispokpok) saw was not his own. Even though that story's been retconned a few times, it's never been made clear whose hand that was (it's been strongly implied to be the Presence). But we did have a Vulcan Green Lantern!
For the record, the hand Krona (and Dawlakispokpok) saw was not his own. Even though that story's been retconned a few times, it's never been made clear whose hand that was (it's been strongly implied to be the Presence). But we did have a Vulcan Green Lantern!
There's a big difference between inserting an in-joke reference to another work of fiction for the benefit of sharp-eyed fans and actually treating that work of fiction as real within the Trek universe. Obviously Doctor Who can't mesh with the Trek universe; even aside from the completely incompatible realities and approaches, we know canonically that Star Trek is a work of fiction within the Doctor Who universe, so they can't share a common "reality" except in an apocryphal story that ignores certain canonical facts of both. Yes, I mentioned that the DTI vault on Eris contained a blue, boxlike object that hummed, and of course that was intended metatextually to be an in-joke reference to the TARDIS, but it should go without saying that I wasn't implying that the TARDIS actually existed in the Trek universe and had been confiscated by the DTI. In-universe, the blue box is presumably something completely different -- just as in-universe, "kei" and "yuri" are Ferengi words or numbers used in access codes rather than the names of the Dirty Pair.
Oh, I see. As for in-joke references, I guess I'm just not a huge enough fan of these crossovers to be motivated to include in-jokes. I have nothing against them, of course, but it just didn't occur to me to reference them specifically. I try not to go overboard on such things. I may throw in the occasional one when I think it's justified and not overly distracting, but I'm not the sort of writer who feels compelled to throw in an in-joke nod to every conceivable thing. Indeed, sometimes it annoys me when people pay more attention to my throwaway in-jokes than to other things that I think are more important, interesting, or funny. For instance, there's a scene in Ex Machina where I had Chapel make a couple of in-joke references to Majel Barrett roles ("Do I sound like the computer?" and "Do I look like somebody's mother?"), and people have often commented on those, but nobody ever seems to remark on the non-referential joke that I think is vastly funnier (McCoy: "I woke up with the rooster every morning!" Chapel: "That's between you and the rooster."). Referencing something familiar is worth a mild chuckle sometimes, but it's one of the laziest, shallowest, least creative forms of humor. If I were writing that scene today, I probably wouldn't have included those in-jokes.
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Rao...that reveal at the end...I kind of already guessed with the Little Girl, but wow...this has been so amazing. It has far exceeded my expectations. I can't wait for the finale next month. I'll be getting the hardcover for sure in a few months.
Have they announced a hardcover? IDW has only done one Trek hardcover to date; everything else has been in TPB.
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